How your brain processes emotions across the entire organ
Researchers at Stanford just found that our emotions aren't just in our heads—they actually light up patterns across the whole brain.
In their study, people got gentle air puffs to the eye (which felt "unpleasant," as one participant put it), and scientists tracked how those emotional reactions lasted even after the initial surprise.
Ketamine sped up the emotional fade-out
The team also studied patients with brain electrodes and saw these lingering emotional waves again.
They tried giving some participants ketamine, which didn't change their first reflex but made those uncomfortable feelings fade faster—one person described it as more of a "tickling of the eyeball."
Plus, when they ran similar tests on mice, they saw matching brain patterns, suggesting this emotional wiring runs deep across species.